Daniel Webster, the famed orator and New Hampshire native, was a featured speaker at the 1847 ribbon cutting for Boston and Maine Railroad's Northern Line. At the ceremony in Lebanon, before a crowd of more than a thousand, he said of the railroad, "It is the spirit and influence of free labor, it is the indomitable industry of a free people, that has done all this."

We see it more and more these days - rail-trails as economic development assets. Cities and towns across America are developing rail-trail networks in order to make their area more attractive, drawing new residents and businesses and providing an environment where people want to live.

Surrounded by the majestic, snowcapped mountains of the Sierra Nevada and renowned for its clear blue water, the country's second deepest lake is surely as stunning today as when Mark Twain saw it more than a century ago. In fact, Lake Tahoe was recently deemed America's best lake by popular vote in a USA Today survey. Although dozens of tributaries flow into the lake, only one flows out, and it is along this waterway that the Truckee River Bike Trail is aligned.

During Colorado's silver mining boom more than a century ago, two railroads struggled for supremacy over the Roaring Forks Valley, in a competition to see which could first finish the tracks into Aspen and lay claim to the rich silver deposits there.

Washington's Iron Horse State Park is one of America's iconic rail-trails. Following the path of the former Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul-Pacific Railroad east out of Seattle, the 82-miles of the Iron Horse pass through the stunning scenery for which the Pacific Northwest is famous, from the base of Rattlesnake Mountain all the way to the Columbia River.

This month, fans of the popular Lord of the Rings movies are eagerly anticipating the latest installment of the acclaimed series, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. For an experience in Middle Earth, adventurers both tall and small can take their own journey along the Otago Central Rail Trail, a well-kept gravel pathway running 150 kilometers (more than 90 miles) through the region where many of the film's sequences were shot.